Joan Walsh

Joan Maureen Walsh (born September 18, 1958) is an American author, editor, writer, and blogger. She was editor-at-large of Salon.com before becoming National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation,[1] and is an MSNBC political analyst.

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From 2005 through 2010, she was the editor-in-chief of Salon.com, a San Francisco-based American liberal politics and culture website. She is the author of What's the Matter With White People? Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was, published in August 2012 by John Wiley and Sons. The paperback version was published by Touchstone/Simon and Schuster in April 2013, with the subtitle: Finding Our Way In The Next America.

Walsh made her second appearance on The O'Reilly Factor in June 2009, discussing the murder of George Tiller and her views on the responsibility of journalists and the impact of their words in controversial matters.[3]

Other areas of interest include education, community development, urban poverty issues, and baseball. She has published two books, Splash Hit: The Pacific Bell Park Story and Stories of Renewal: Community Building and the Future of Urban America.[4]

Walsh endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 and the 2016 Presidential Democratic Primaries. She declared the 2016 endorsement in an article titled, "Why I’m Supporting Hillary Clinton, With Joy and Without Apologies."[5] Some praised the article for articulating the feminist stance for a Hillary Clinton presidency, while others criticized the article for failing to list substantiative policy differences between Clinton and her primary opponent Senator Bernie Sanders and for portraying Sanders' supporters as misogynists.[6][7]

She was further criticized when she implied that the Bernie Sanders campaign contained a racist undercurrent for losing the minority vote in most states, despite gathering large support from young minority voters and attracting prominent black surrogates such as Killer Mike, Erica Garner, Cornel West, and Spike Lee.[8] She also implied that Bernie Sanders' support might have been coming from racist working class whites who were punishing Clinton for her role as Secretary of State in the administration of the first black President of the United States, Barack Obama.[9]

A backlash against these types of racial arguments developed on social media around the hashtag #BernieMadeMeWhite, where people of color parodied the criticism against the Bernie Sanders campaign by tweeting things such as, "Ever since I voted for Bernie, I've been bingewatching Friends.#BernieMadeMeWhite," and, "Golly, I started to support Sanders and now I am allergic to gluten! #BernieMadeMeWhite #FeelTheBern."[10][11] The originator of the hashtag, Leslie Lee III, identified Walsh as "one of the chief purveyors of this line [of criticism]" and described one incident on MSNBC as especially egregious, "[Walsh] spoke about the whiteness of a Sanders rally in Washington — just as a camera panned over a group of Hispanic voters holding a sign that read 'V-I-V-A-B-E-R-N-I-E,' and moments before Sanders was introduced by Sikh leader Hira Bhullar."[12]

On Twitter, Walsh dismissed accusations that she had erased people of color who supported Bernie Sanders, "I'm sorry they feel erased by the demographic data provided by exit polls."[10][13] However many responded that it was hypocrisy to dismiss their argument as she had made exactly the same argument when she spoke of young female voters in her Clinton endorsement, "I know Bernie is leading among millennials by a lot right now in the polls. Nonetheless, millions of millennials, including millions of young women, are supporting Hillary Clinton. And my daughter...is one of them. I find it increasingly galling to see her and her friends erased in this debate."[5]